Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Flickr have become popular not just among young adults – who are mostly students – but also among businessmen who have found them to be veritable advertising tools.
But psychologists at the Open University of the Netherland found that students who use Facebook while they study get significantly lower grades than those who do not.
They found that the exam results of those who used the social networking site while working, even if it was on in the background, were 20 per cent lower than non-users.
Researchers say the findings undermine the theory that young people‘s brains are better at multi-tasking on digital gadgets.
Study author, Prof. Paul Kirschner, was quoted by The Mail of London as saying, ”The problem is that most people have Facebook or other social networking sites, their emails and maybe instant messaging constantly running in the background while they are carrying out other tasks.
”Our study, and other previous works, suggest that while people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes.”
His team studied 219 students aged between 19 and 54 at an American university.
The Facebook users among them had a typical grade point average – a score from zero up to four – of 3.06. Non-users had an average GPA of 3.82.
Those who did not use the site also said they devoted more time to studying, spending an average of 88 per cent longer working outside class.
Three quarters of the Facebook users said they didn‘t believe spending time on the site affected their academic performance.
Kirschner said that he expected to see similar results in younger pupils.
He also said he was not ‘demonising‘ Facebook and pointed to the distracting nature of all social networking.
‘We should resist the fashionable views of educational gurus that children can multi-task, and that we should adapt our education systems accordingly to keep up with the times,‘ he said.
The study, according to The Mail of London, will be published in the journal, Computers in Human Behaviour.
The study‘s result seems consistent with that of another study conducted in the United States last year which suggested a link between social networking sites and academic performance.
According to the study conducted on 219 students at Ohio State University, students who said they used Facebook reported grade-point averages between 3.0 and 3.5; those who didn‘t use it said they averaged 3.5 to 4.0. Also, Facebook users said they studied one to five hours a week as against non-users‘ 11 hours or more.
But Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student in the school, who conducted the research with graduate student Adam Duberstein, was quoted by the USA Today as saying that the study was too narrow to conclude that Facebook and academics didn‘t mix.
She said, ”It cannot be stated that Facebook use causes a student to study less or get lower grades. I‘m just saying that they‘re related somehow, and we need to look into it further.” Of the 68 per cent of students who said they used Facebook, 65 per cent accessed the site or multiple times daily.
An American professor, Mark Bauerlein, in his recent book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don‘t Trust Anyone Under 30), warned that social networking sites were doing young adults more harm than good.
Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, US, said today‘s young adults had been shaped by exposure to computer technology since elementary school.
The cost, he was quoted as saying by USA Today, outweighed the convenience. ”Kids are writing more than ever online or in text messages, but it‘s not the kind of narrative skill needed as adults,” he says. ”Those forms groove bad habits, so when it comes time to produce an academic paper … or when they enter the workplace, their capacity breaks down.”
However, it is not all doom for social networking sites. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, United States in 2008 discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
A lecturer in the Department of English, University of Lagos, Dr. Emmanuel Adedun, said that the findings of the studies were in tune with his observation. He said that he had observed that social networking sites engaged students‘ attention so much that it affects their academic performance.
According to him, ”If the findings were that use of social networking sites affects students‘ performance negatively, then, they are in tune with my observations. You see, our children here in Nigeria today are more into anything entertainment. And they get a lot of entertainment from these sites. This, therefore, engages their attention to the extent that it affects their cognitive performance negatively.”
According to Science Daily, an online science news publication, Mrs. Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university‘s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study, said, ”What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practising the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today.
”Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customising content and thinking about online design and layout. They‘re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential.”
